Bishop of Myra Meets the Arrow of Time

December is the month we remember (among other things) the good deeds of the well-off Bishop of Myra, a 4^th century do-gooder named Nicholas. The guy slipped his considerable inheritance under the doors of many a despondent maiden that she might find companionship in that day’s dowry-driven lovefest. Much later we would recast Nick as an oddly jovial ectomorph swaddled in red velveteen with white fur trim – a color scheme handily mapped to that of the Coca-Cola can for whose commercial benefit the good bishop would be wildly repurposed. Whew! 

December is also the temporal endcap on another “year,” the approximate time it takes our wet rock to career like a tipsy fool around the fireball that paints it with energy. As arbitrary as the human construct “the end of the year” may be (our planet’s rotary waltz around the sun is, after all, a circle without beginning or end), this “year end” notion offers a handy benchmark against which to measure one’s individual life-and-love infused journey. 

Time (the columnist mused in his dinner jacket, drawing thoughtfully on his bubble pipe) – what is it? It’s the subject of much Philosophy of Science jibber jabber, for one thing. Quantum physics earnestly poses the question why can’t we remember the future? – quantum Confucianism so seemingly moronic it makes the non-physics dimwit feel briefly superior. 

In fact, in quantum principle time is reversible, but entropy’s increasing cosmic disorganization thataway carries us along with it. And so we find ourselves hurled forward through time on a seeming rocket sled, hair blown back (or in my case blown pretty much completely off the head) by the crazy velocity. Thousands of remembered moments are strung like beads behind us, those moments accruing emotional power as we move ceaselessly away from them and they become less and less distinct in memory, viewed as through an increasingly frosted pane of glass. 

Love (of course) centers the fugue state – love for our families, for our friends present and absent, a yearning love for the past’s weighted seconds and minutes themselves; deepening love for what they were to us. Ram Dass – the former Harvard professor Richard Alpert – famously counseled us to Be Here Now. It took an infusion of psilocybin to part Alpert’s curtain. Why? Why is the incomprehensible value of a moment so often couched as retrospection? It’s more than a little nutty, this piercingly temporal hayride, its component moments infinitely precious. 

Because I’m driving the Smith-Corona, I’m now going to foist my own enraptured backward glance on you, the beleaguered reader. Experience tells me you’ll forgive – to a degree. You do have my gratitude for your patience, per the norm. 

I Remember;

I remember Mrs. Petrie, my third grade teacher at Clark Elementary school in Cheyenne, bequeathing me the crepe paper crown that made me King for a Day on the last class of the school year before my family moved to Wheelus AFB in Libya; I remember my teetotal plummet to the concrete floor at a Psychedelic Furs concert in Phoenix, the naive attempt to keep up with my red solo cup-hoisting date ultimately causing me to literally faint dead away in my New Wave blazer and Doc Martens (first date/last date); I remember running around with my doomed little brother at Michigan’s Crystal Lake, the only vacation my family ever took, my dad reuniting with a cadre of his old Detroit pals and their wives; I remember getting up in the dark in my worshipped older brother’s Washington, D.C. apartment to take a boat ride on the Potomac, the radio alarm waking me with the Bee Gees song “Run to Me;” I remember my fury at my high school prom date dancing with a classmate whose dad, I knew, had been blown up by the AZ mob for his Arizona Republic reporting; I remember, at 7 years old, cozily following my dad and his friends around their 18 holes as they putted through a cobbled-together, impromptu course that wove throughout the Warren AFB clubhouse as it poured rain outside; I remember my terrified first-ever time on a club stage with my band at Merlin’s, a storied rock venue in Tempe, a couple blocks from the ASU campus; I remember balmy, orange blossom-scented nights playing ping-pong on our back patio in the dead of a desert night with my parents’ friends the Privozniks, our tiny kidney-shaped swimming pool underlit and glowing like topaz; I remember Saturday night Hand in Hand concerts at the non-denominational sandals and cutoffs church my pals and I attended; I remember my older brother being tearily “pinned” by my mom’s brother, Uncle Bill, who’d been one of the American soldiers present at the Elbe River linkup in Germany between the U.S. and Russian armies on their way to a collapsing Berlin; I remember a Stetson-wearing Libyan friend named Omran skating around the terra cotta tile of our Wheelus AFB quarters (4G) in demonstration of the durability of his expensive new watch; I remember my older sister blasting the Hair soundtrack out of her room in those same quarters, 1968; I remember my first disbelieving view of Santa Barbara in ’83 or so as we visited our friends at Westmont, an unimaginable college seemingly conjured in the middle of an enchanted forest; I remember the very last time I exited my mom’s apartment with her – she happily hoisting an apple for the road – to go to the dementia care facility whose confusing, stressful environs would lead to her life-ending stroke a few months later; I remember the insane birth of my kids, the doctor hollering the Seussian “Sam I Am!” at my son’s arrival and, at the obstetrician’s later gender reveal by phone, my sprinting Paul Revere act in the rental house on Coronado Island – “I’m having a daughter!” (my life partner briefly demoted as a participant in the episode); I remember my utterly electrifying wee hours first kiss with my high school gf, brilliant desert moonlight pouring silver into my parent’s darkened living room through parted curtains, when to my abject horror my dad walked in wearing his outsized boxers: “…what’re you doing out here, Jeffry? Oh!…” followed by dear Bob Wing’s stunned march through the kitchen and back to his room; I remember a college pal memorably saying one night – at a friend’s house near 44^th and Osborn in Phoenix – that fervent Christians are so fixated on faith and heaven they miss the magic of “Beethoven and first kisses”, a line I will never forget; I remember my roommate calling me to the phone to tell me my mother was crying uncontrollably the night my little brother was in a horrifying head on collision where Clarendon meets 48^th street; I remember Santa Barbara’s crowded Rocky Galenti’s by the beach where my band was between sets, turning to the right to see the Dutch girl I’d been chatting with earlier, Judie – wearing a Robert Smith t-shirt, purple tube skirt, and European Chuck Taylor knockoffs, her hair out to here – standing still in the maelstrom of clubgoers and beaming me a mellow, indescribably gorgeous smile it brings me to tears to now describe, the day that began my Actual Life; I remember proposing to Juudje in our tiny “zolder” bedroom at the top of her parents’ house in Monster, the Netherlands, proffering the ring I’d wandered confusedly through the Hague to buy, using her sister Karin’s finger size as guide; I remember hours spent saucer-sledding down Wonderland Hill with my 7 year-old little brother in Boulder where we lived, our white collie Casey running around and barking, the Flatirons in the middle distance, the “future” a bus trip to school the following day.

Wide

I worked for a long time at a Santa Barbara bookshop called The Earthling. At that time they were at the corner of State Street and Victoria and had a little underground office. One day I was down there with the owner, dear Penny Davies, a strong-willed Greek woman with opinions, determination, and an occasionally delicious projectile scorn. She pulled something from her slush pile of mail. “Listen to this, Jeff,” she said. She could barely contain herself. 

“Life is short,” she read aloud. “But it’s wide.” She threw her head back and roared with laughter so rich I began helplessly gasping with laughter, too. I’ll never forget it. But in the intervening years, I’ve understood the line as a genuine attempt to explain All This. Life does indeed fly by when we’re not looking, but on even the briefest reflection it can be almost impossible to believe the depth and breadth of love, glory, friendship and sorrow we manage to shoehorn into this eyeblink. I’ve heard of a 90-something man asking of his son-in-law, “Where did the time go?” 

Where, indeed. We’ve circumambulated the old fireball yet again. Happy December. Onward.